


Buying Time

by Zaniida



Series: The Many Kidnappings of Harold P. Finch [2]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Additional Tags in End Note, Denise's Delight, Episode: s01e02 Ghosts, Fear, Gen, Harold in Peril, Interrogation, Pain, gunman, hitman - Freeform, stalling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-02-10 13:05:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12912519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaniida/pseuds/Zaniida
Summary: Giving Theresa time to escape meant distracting the hitman for as long as he could -- even if Harold likely wouldn't make it out alive.





	1. Cornered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gun beats knife; that was self-evident, especially when the knife-wielder was a scared teenager with no real training.
> 
> Getting her out of there had been the right move -- yet that left Harold, alone, with the hitman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back together with my beta reader and feeling pumped after a tremendously successful (if occasionally bizarre and off-putting) NaNoWriMo this year. I've got plans through to January, and I'm looking forward to tying up a few series within the next couple of months, so I can focus my efforts on the longer series and not feel too bad about starting another couple that have been waiting in the wings for months now.
> 
> To each of my readers: I hope your holiday season is treating you all right, and that you can enjoy time making wonderfilled memories with good friends and family and delicious comfort food. And hey, it's a little early, but, _Merry Christmas!_

Their trick with the phones should have bought them some time, but, of course, not enough -- and John was halfway across town. Whatever was going to happen in this hotel, it would be over and done with before John could get anywhere near the place.

Harold had had a brief desire to phone hotel security -- but there hadn’t really been time to make the call, and injecting an innocent guard into a fight with an unpredictable hitman seemed destined only to add to the body count. The one principle he was operating on by this point was that he was here to reduce the number of casualties; he and John were acceptable losses, but no one else. It was no good trading one death for another.

All the same, he had to admire the courage and resourcefulness of this girl, as she paused to block up the door with a random board and scoot a laundry basket into the way. A small delay for the man tracking her down, but perhaps it might be enough. “Over here -- _quickly_ ,” he gasped out, hoping his voice didn’t carry too far, and Theresa hurried to his side, already trusting his judgment more than she had even ten minutes ago.

When he opened the window to the fire escape, though, she balked. “Not without you.”

“I can’t fit through there,” he said, with no time to go into the ways that his body just wouldn’t bend that way anymore. If he had had time, sure, he could manage it, if not in the most dignified manner -- but not in the time they had.

Theresa drew her box cutter, a determined look on her face -- and Harold had to cut that impulse short before it killed her.

“Gun beats knife,” he said quickly, firmly, “unless you’re right next to him, and I don’t want to chance that. If you’re here, he’ll shoot you, and then kill me just to get rid of witnesses. But if you’re gone, there’s a chance he won’t care about me. I might be able to bluff my way out. You’ve got to go.”

With a swallow, she nodded, and as she went through the window he added, “Stay hidden -- stay safe. John will find you again.” And then he closed the window behind her, and turned back to the elevator just as it dinged--

\--and just as the gunman came around the corner.

Eyeing the otherwise empty corridor, the gunman strolled up, gun pointed straight at Harold’s chest, and leaned to lazily check inside the elevator, as if he knew the girl wouldn’t be there. Then he turned his attention back to Harold, who had backed up a couple steps before freezing in place, trying to contain his trembles.

He couldn’t stop looking at the gun. It wasn’t even the first time he’d been held at gunpoint, but it was the first time he couldn’t really expect to walk away from it, and all his brain could muster was a constant refrain of _not yet not yet not yet_. Not so much fear for himself as for the work they’d just begun, and the fact that he hadn’t even shown John the ropes yet, not enough to take up the cause in his absence; his methods were deliberately obscure, and while it was possible that John could figure them out on his own, Harold didn’t want to count on it. He needed -- he _needed_ to survive.

Death was staring him in the face, unblinking, and Harold wasn’t ready.

“Where’s the girl?” the man asked calmly, gun not wavering.

How could Harold have thought that he could bluff his way out of the encounter? He couldn’t even get his brain to form words.

The gunman cast a glance at the window. “I take it she’s gone, then,” he said, as if it didn’t really matter to him one way or the other. And Harold realized then that the man was so cock-sure of himself that he didn’t care about the delays; he knew that he’d get Theresa eventually. Their efforts had merely delayed the inevitable.

With a quick cock of one eyebrow, the man gestured with his gun, bidding Harold to head down the hallway. Unable to think of anything to do other than stall -- in the slim hope that John would get there and rescue him, or at the very least that it would afford Theresa more time to get away -- Harold meekly walked past the gunman, his shoulders tight, stomach clenched, mouth dry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hereby establish _Denise's Delight_ as a tag meaning content that appeals to Denise ( **M_E_Lover** ), which is to say, poor Harold Finch getting tormented in various ways. I may go back and add it retroactively to some of my earlier fics.
> 
>  **Content Warning:** The second chapter (which I've partially written) has some mild to moderate (depending on your standards) torture, just the deliberate inflicting of pain and bruising in a slow and controlled manner, to establish dominance and make the victim of the interrogation more willing to talk and/or less able to lie. So, basically what John was doing in the first installment of this series ( _[Strip Search](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10970223)_ ), only John used embarrassment and the anxiety of uncertainty instead of resorting to pain.
> 
> I have no idea as to the future content of this story, except that I'll be attempting to maintain the feel of the canon hitman character, a slow, methodical, goal-oriented who's definitely more than just a brainless thug. I don't expect that the torture will get all that bad, compared to my usual fare, but I decided to go with _Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings_ since I'm not sure how gruesome it might get. It's only the start of the series, so probably will stay fairly tame.
> 
> As the first time in this series that Harold gets kidnapped (by an actual enemy) -- and being pretty early in the series, when Harold didn't really have a lot of experience in field work -- it seems realistic to me that Harold, confronted with the gunman directly, would be mostly frozen and terrified, and then compliant, compared to later entries in the series (whether canon or in my fics). He doesn't get to spend much time staring down the gunman in this episode, but he does just freeze, so my interpretation seems to jive with canon, at any rate. Baby steps, Harold.
> 
>  **December Scheduling**  
>  So, the plan is to add a chapter to each of several open series -- ideally tying off at least one of them -- and now to actually get my _Finchnappings_ series properly underway. Of note: _Mirror_ will not be one of the updates, partly because I got really interested in filling out several other stories, and partly because I think it would feel kinda weird to make my rapefic one of the updates during December. So you'll have to wait 'til at least January for that.
> 
> I may be switching my update schedule to somewhat later in the week, due to some things going on here that make it difficult to concentrate on my existing schedule (and require me to sometimes get up early, derailing my desire to finish an assignment on time by staying up late).
> 
> Also, it's my intention to throw some updates at my NaNoWriMo project as well -- I'm not giving up on that one just yet. As I stated, though, anyone's free to pick up the idea and run with it, see where it takes them. But I'll be adding more un-beta'd updates to it as time goes by.
> 
>  **Lastly:** My apologies to the person waiting on my Reward Drabble. I was hoping to do them in order, and my nephew scored the second one, so I was waiting for him to actually put some time into watching the series so he could choose an appropriate challenge (he's only watched like two episodes, and I told him he had to watch at least like six). However, since he's dragging his feet, maybe I'll write them out of order after all. Bugs me.


	2. Reasoning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Normally, he'd clam up; he's good at that. Protecting sensitive information is Harold's normal mode of discourse.
> 
> But if he clams up right now, he's dead. And so is Theresa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, January has been an incredibly distracting month, what with trying to work on compilation videos for my channel and then getting distracted from that into a couple new video games and learning a text-game engine (Inform 7) to boot. (It is possible that at some point I might combine my fanfiction with my desire to create some small text games, so that's a thought for the future.)
> 
> I'm just glad I managed a second upload before the end of the month. Now we get to see what February brings!

The room the hitman brought him to was several doors down from their original room, which meant greater delays if John could ever catch up to them -- but Harold was getting the impression that he’d be dead long before John would manage to get to the building.

When the man motioned to a cushioned chair, Harold sat, closing his eyes for a moment as his stomach sank even further. For himself, the man pulled out a desk chair, and sat on it facing Harold, at first just observing him, for what felt like an eternity, but was probably less than a full minute.

“I can’t see two separate groups helping that girl,” the hitman said, finally, “so that guy who shot me, he’s probably working with you, yeah?”

With deception such a significant part of his life, Harold was used to lying, whether with his words or with his face alone -- and yet, he’d never had to try those skills out while honestly fearing for his life. He found that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t control his reactions or his expression; there was no point in trying to use words to hide what his face revealed, so he simply sat there, silent, staring at the gun.

“Guy’s out of shape,” the man mused, “but he’s got skills. The kind of skills you get from actual field work; I know the type. And you, you’ve got the kind of funds to wear a suit like that -- I’m just gonna assume that you’re also the one who bought out this entire floor.” Harold must have flinched, because the man’s grin grew a little wider, a little more knowing. “Yeah, I snuck a look at the registry before I came up here. Interesting, you know, how a girl on the run happens across a random rich guy and a bodyguard. She manage to give you a sob story? Get you to agree to protect her from the big bad boogeyman?”

At Harold’s silence, the man chuckled. “Nah. See, I got it in my head that you’ve got some interest in that inheritance she’s got coming. That’s the only way it makes sense, wasting this much money to protect the girl yourself, rather than just turning her over to the cops. You want to keep it quiet… maybe manage to get rid of me on your own, somehow.

“And yet, you haven’t tried to bribe me. Now, why would that be?”

Harold’s mouth worked, but he couldn’t come up with sounds any more than he could come up with plausible misdirection to counter where the man was headed with his hypotheses. He swallowed, finding even that maneuver difficult.

“Is it the gun?” the man asked. “Do I scare you, little rich guy? Was I more than you expected?” He paused. “You’d think that your partner there would’ve clued you in to what was coming after the girl. Unless… he didn’t really think he’d killed me, did he?” With a chuckle, he lumbered to his feet, concluding, “You know, I owe you guys for these bruises.”

Before Harold could quite anticipate the move, the man’s hand was over his mouth, and the other hand pressing _hard_ into his ribs, the fingers formed into a solid point. At first, Harold closed his eyes and just tried to bear it, sure that struggling would make it worse, but as the pressure and pain intensified, he couldn’t help himself: He squirmed, grabbing at the man’s arm, trying to pull it away -- scrabbled at the hand over his mouth, dug his manicured fingernails into the skin. Even that was useless, and the man probably didn’t even realize how much additional pain he was causing simply by pushing Harold’s head back, forcing his neck to a bad angle.

As hot tears started to roll down Harold’s cheeks, the man pulled away, leaving him to shudder and gasp as the pain receded, with just enough left to remind him that he’d have a nasty bruise there by morning.

…if he lived to see the morning.

With a mild expression, the man studied Harold, as he sat down. Then he felt around his own ribs a bit until he winced -- rather dramatically. “Ah, yes, there’s the other one,” he said, and stood up again.

“Please, d--” Harold managed before the hand covered his mouth again.

“So you _can_ talk,” the man said with some amusement, as he dug his fist into Harold’s ribs in a new spot, matching the location he’d found on his own body. Writhing, Harold cried out into the man’s hand, the sound muffled. When finally the man let go and sat down in his chair again, Harold couldn’t help the shaky sobs that poured out of him.

The hotel wasn’t cheap; he doubted that anyone on the floor below could have heard him. It was a small mercy: No one would break in on them and, for their heroism, get shot.

No one would come to save him. He closed his eyes, trying to come to terms with that fact.

“Job like this, I’m gonna get a few bruises,” the hitman said affably. “So I’m gonna overlook the ones that weren’t made by bullets; sound fair? Now… just so I don’t regret that mercy,” he continued, nudging Harold’s knee with the gun, “how’s about you tell me why a guy with so much money decided to help a runaway street girl?”

If he couldn’t expect to make it out of this situation alive, then he had to focus on other goals for the life he had left. Distract the man. Keep him in the room for as long as possible; the interrogation could hardly last for even an hour, but every minute’s delay meant better chances for Theresa to find a good place to hide. And even if John couldn’t get here in time to save Harold, perhaps he could still get here in time to spot the hitman when he left, thus handling him before he could get near Theresa again.

On the other hand, for all Harold’s facility with spinning out yarns, he doubted his ability to do so convincingly while under this kind of pressure. And yet, telling him the truth was out of the question. If the man got free -- if John wasn’t able to stop him -- then any amount of truth he pried out of Harold would be dangerous, perhaps disastrous. Even if Harold tried to stick to the very edges of the truth, just enough to keep the man interested, he’d end up saying things he’d wish he could take back; the risk was unacceptable. He had to stick to his normal half-truths and evasions -- for as long as possible.

“You kill people for money,” Harold managed, gulping, “but I-I have more money than I could ever spend. Figured I could do sssome good with it.”

“First lie,” the man said, and aimed the barrel of the gun right at Harold’s knee. For one harrowing moment, Harold thought he was going to fire. Instead, he pressed the barrel in just under the kneecap, and kept pressing forward; when Harold tried to shift his leg, the man grabbed his calf and held him still. The pressure soon passed the threshold to pain, as Harold panted through it and wondered if he was about to lose his good leg -- to never walk again.

“Now, why don’t you tell me the real reason?” the man said, not letting up.

“I fffound out that she was going to be killed,” Harold gasped, “and I wanted to intervene. To use my resources to… to help her. That’s the truth, I swear it! _Please_ \--”

After a thoughtful moment, the man withdrew, and took in a breath, letting it out with a satisfied sigh, as though pleased with his work.

“Well,” he said, “s’pose I could believe you, then. For the moment. But if that’s the truth, why not simply go to the cops?”

Harold’s brain supplied the answer, instantly: _Because they wouldn’t have listened in time_.

The lesson had been drummed home repeatedly over the past year: It took an _extraordinary_ amount of effort to convince the police to pay attention to one of these cases. In their eyes, the evidence just wasn’t worth the resources, and, of course, Harold couldn’t point out how incontrovertible his information actually was. And that was their take on the best material he could throw their way; how could he have convinced them to look for a dead girl? Especially when he claimed that someone was trying to kill her?

Of course, now that John had found Theresa, all that rationale fell away. The hitman had attacked her in public, with witnesses -- there was no question of the danger. With Theresa squirreled away in police custody, John could’ve focused his whole attention on the threat; Harold would never have even left the library.

Why hadn’t he stopped to consider that avenue? Had he truly become so jaded against police involvement that he’d come to see the cops as more of a threat than an asset? John had just as much reason to be wary of police attention, but he’d still pulled Fusco into their operation; where Harold’s paranoia said to simply avoid the risk, John thought it was worth the benefit they’d get from even an asset as dubious as a crooked cop. Of course, should Fusco turn on them, John had the skills to deal with the inevitable fallout; Harold was at a loss whenever he left the computer.

Well, no, that wasn’t precisely true. He did have a talent for planning, and spatial reasoning; those were best utilized via digital tools, but they still worked in the real world. On a few occasions, he had managed to touch the heart of a stranger with his words; his social skills were stunted, not absent. And his facility with cover identities had required him to develop his talent for acting: Using a combination of clothing, props, expectation management, and overall demeanor, he could -- with equal finesse -- either fade into the background, or command the attention of an entire building. When he was playing his part, he rarely felt the need to back down, or even hesitate; he always had a plan, always knew what to do.

Of course, that only worked when he wasn’t caught off guard and _terrified out of his mind_.

But that was what had gotten him into this mess: fear. His uneasy relationship with the police had led him to ignore the help they might have offered him, and now he was here, sitting across from a killer, in what was almost certainly his final hour on earth. An hour of pain and fear, and he couldn’t even pretend to himself that he didn’t deserve it.

The hitman gripped Harold’s face again, squeezing his cheeks in one meaty hand as Harold trembled helplessly in his grasp. “Shouldn’t be a hard question to answer,” the man asserted, just as unruffled as ever. “You trying to make up a lie?”

“I don’t know!” Harold blurted through the man’s fingers.

With a baffled look, the man released him. “…You don’t know whether or not you’re lying?” he clarified, his gaze unwavering as he studied Harold’s face.

“It’s not that,” Harold said, rubbing his cheeks. “I just -- you asked me why I didn’t take this to the police, and… the fact of the matter is that I don’t actually _know_. I’m still trying to figure out why I _didn’t_.”

Blinking, the man sat back, amusement creeping into his expression.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Harold continued -- babbling, now, because he was out of time and out of options. “I wasn’t being logical. The police could have helped her -- better than we have, objectively better. But I never even thought of it as an option.”

The hitman raised his eyebrows. “Well, that’s… more honesty than I expected,” he drawled. “Not many admit their own foolishness.”

Studying the carpet, Harold tried to put words together in a way that wouldn’t give away too much. At least this exchange did seem to be distracting the man; Harold hadn’t really expected to go in this direction, but, at this point, he couldn’t think of a more compelling topic.

“I used to think,” he began, a little hesitantly, “that I was bad at reading people. Most of the people that I’ve had contact with have remained a mystery to me, and I’ve made critical errors simply by not realizing what people will do when their secrets are threatened.” He closed his eyes, the sense-memory of Nathan’s death pressing in on him. “You see, I’ve always been aware that my… way of approaching the world was… a little different. And I thought that it was that very difference that made it so hard for me to understand other human beings. But it had always been my impression that humans were generally… _logical_.

“But then… well… I’ve spent the past decade studying human behavior,” he continued, a little worried about how easily these truths were spilling out of him, but unable to stop. “I’ve been looking for patterns, trying to make predictions… and I’ve noticed one undeniable constant in human behavior. I wish I could say it was something like compassion, or trust, even self-interest. No, the one constant in human behavior is that humans aren’t as logical as they like to think they are.”

The hitman chuckled, almost thoughtfully. “And you’ve just come face to face with your own illogical side.”

Harold nodded. “I guess I’m not as different as I expected. A decade looking into countless examples of humans being human, and I… I can’t even understand my _own_ behavior, let alone anyone else’s.”

“Mmm. And yet you managed to talk the girl into relying on you for safety. Unless that was your bodyguard who did the persuasion?”

“It was,” Harold said, fighting off the desire to go with his usual M.O. and just clam up. In every other situation, clamming up was the most effective means of accomplishing his goal -- generally, the goal of not handing over sensitive information -- but here, it would be suicide. Well, _faster_ suicide, anyway; he still had no illusions of being able to walk out of this room. More crucially, the faster he got killed, the faster the hitman would be on the trail again, and so Harold didn’t have the option of staying silent.

At least his fear was subsiding, gradually turning to a calm sense of resignation. It made it a little easier to think, and right now he needed that clarity.

“So,” the hitman mused, “the little rich guy who doesn’t understand people, and the bodyguard who can talk a scared kid into trusting him with her life. Quite the pairing. How’d you convince him to work for you? I get the feeling it was more than just money.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> February's prompt should be up tomorrow, ideally bright and early, so we'll see what comes of that. So far, only one person bit on my January prompt, which was a bit of a disappointment; I'm not sure if that means the prompt wasn't well constructed, or people who might've filled it were just busy/distracted (like me! sigh), or if there's another factor I'm not considering.
> 
> But eh. We're just getting started, and it's not like I'm making better time than anyone else at fulfilling my goals. I'll just have to get more interesting with my prompts!


End file.
